Many years ago when I tried to make my first Gingerbread House with my children (5 and 8 years) hated it ! The house kept collapsing and decorations would easily fall. Children lost interest after seeing all of their decorations destroyed. The frosting takes too long to stick the walls together so a year after and since I had no interest for my children to eat the house full of sweets I decided to hot glue the walls and only decorate for fun using frosting! There is still a lot of work involved but all kid friendly

Now we run workshops with up to 20 houses at a time and all adult stress free. We placed all glued houses with the materials on the table. Each child with their own portion of materials to avoid fighting over candy.

They colored their frosting using food coloring, depending on the brand we used the following:

Pretty Purple : 12 drops of Red + 8 drops of Blue

Orange Sunset: 12 drops of Yellow + 4 drops of Red

I let children drop their color in it, worse that could happen is you getting Black which would be useful as well.

The second phase was the fondant, I let them play with it as Play Dough, I brought some rolling pins and fondant cutters, they used it as grass or vines around the house. It looked really good and they learned about frosting vs. fondant technique.

We taught about 4 different piping techniques, depending on the age. Something important to consider is that I reinforced each line and corner of the house using frosting, that way nobody would know our hot glue secret.

Lastly, they decorated using all their bones, spiders and RIP stones. Black Candy canes and hardball candy. Candy corn was used as pines and flowers on some of the houses.